A Bolo Tie in Santa Fe
Navajo artisan jeweler Randy Hoskie's story
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Ticket to Enchantment
When Randy Hoskie was a teenager herding sheep on the Navajo reservation, a radio connected him to faraway places.
I’d sit on the horse and watch the sheep, and I’d carry a radio. And I used to always hear places like Chicago, New York, all these places. I said, “One day I’d like to go and see all these places.” So when I started making jewelry, that was the ticket."
I met Randy Saturday at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. He was one of the Native American vendors selling jewelry, authenticated through a program of the New Mexico History Museum.
On his blanket I saw just what I was looking for: a lapis lazuli bolo tie.
The depth of the stone’s blueness mesmerized me. Ancient Egyptians believed lapis promotes wisdom, insight, and truth. When I was a boy in Pampa, Texas, a bolo tie was my most prized possession, rivaled only by my Davy Crockett faux coonskin cap.
Randy, a trusting soul, let me wear the bolo across the plaza to an ATM machine. “I’ll leave her here for collateral,” I said, gesturing to Darlene.
Earlier that morning, she had made a similarly enchanting purchase—a pair of pink and orange designer eyeglasses. Only after I had bought the bolo did I ask what she had paid for them.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re about even.”
As I write this in our hotel room, Darlene and 13 other women are downstairs creating fabric collage artworks with their teacher, Susan Carlson of Harpswell, Maine. The class will continue all week.
Yesterday Darlene and I were enjoying pastry and lattés at La Fonda Hotel’s bakery and coffee shop. When I saw Randy arrive, I asked if he would be willing to record a conversation about my bolo tie.
That’s how I learned how he made his first piece of jewelry as a teenager and how his metalsmithing career has brought him to the places he dreamed of seeing, listening to the radio on his horse, watching the sheep.
“They say it has healing powers,” Randy told me, referring to lapis lazuli.
Today as I wore my new bolo while visiting the Georgia O’Keefe Museum and attending a recovery fellowship meeting at a Unitarian Church, I could feel it: the enchantment of dreaming where you’d like to go next. And finding a ticket to get there where you least expected it.
Love it!